It is a collaborative case examine between Influencer Advertising and marketing Hub and Linqia, breaking down how Instacart leveraged creator-led storytelling to drive full-funnel outcomes.
Instacart is delivering the way forward for grocery. A decade in the past, Instacart launched a brand new mannequin for on-line grocery purchasing and handy dwelling supply. At present, they provide retail enablement options for greater than 2,200 retail banners throughout practically 100,000 places. The corporate’s intuitive, easy options for retailers, clients, manufacturers and buyers are reworking how the world retailers, eats and lives.
Linqia is the main unbiased influencer advertising and marketing company within the US. Leveraging our AI-powered proprietary expertise platform, Resonate, we work with a few of the world’s main manufacturers to develop and execute creatively compelling creator-led methods that ship full-funnel outcomes.
Instacart wished to be positioned as a culturally-relevant and emotionally-resonant model that empowers shoppers to reside within the second by dealing with their summer season purchasing wants. The corporate knew that, in 2025, shoppers have been fighting the rising value of groceries and that many have been nostalgic for the costs and meals of many years passed by. So, the model turned to influencer advertising and marketing company, Linqia, to launch a creator-led marketing campaign rooted in nostalgia.
Technique
Instacart supplied shoppers a summer season promotion combining the nostalgia-fueled pleasure of 1999 costs with the comfort of modern-day supply.
Linqia devised a three-pronged creator-led technique to drive consciousness of the deal and relevance for the model, anchored on playful, nostalgia-driven storytelling.
Our plan consisted of:
- Natural Creator Posting: Linqia recognized, contracted, and briefed Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube creators with important followings, tapping them for his or her attain and affect, in addition to their storytelling skills.
- Asset Optimization: Linqia’s Put up-Manufacturing staff edited natural creator content material to be used in lower-funnel paid social campaigns throughout Meta, TikTok, and Snap, optimizing property to stick to greatest practices for paid social inventive.
- Creator Generated Content material (CGC): Linqia additionally contracted lower-following creators and briefed them to create “made for paid” property to be used throughout paid social at a fraction of the price of conventional manufacturing.
Total, we created 76 property spotlighting Instacart’s throwback offers.
For the natural creator posts, we impressed influencers by giving them a number of inventive methods in, permitting them to decide on the method that might resonate greatest with their engaged audiences and distinctive content material kinds.
Inventive approaches included:
- Supply Roulette: shock snack hauls;
- 1 Day vs. 1 Month: ’90s-inspired transformations;
- Get Prepared With Me, However It’s 1999: nostalgic appears plus lunches.
Outcomes
The notice and relevance-focused natural marketing campaign delivered sturdy upper-funnel outcomes, as measured by an unbiased Dynata model raise examine. Creator content material drove a +20pt raise in unaided model consciousness and a +5.6pt raise in buy intent.
Viewers engagement was additionally above benchmark on Instagram and YouTube. Creators’ Instagram Reels delivered a 6.9% common engagement fee, whereas creators’ YouTube Shorts delivered a 5.2% common engagement fee. In the meantime, TikTok delivered the strongest view fee at 129%.
High-performing natural content material included Reels from creators @aww.sam and @aliciasicz that delivered engagement charges over 7X and over 3X the Instacart benchmark.
What’s extra, our property drove lower-funnel motion in paid social, with Meta delivering the best CTRs to drive purchases.
The marketing campaign was shortlisted for the 2026 Digiday Video & TV Awards within the Finest Social Video Marketing campaign class, recognizing the standard of our video content material and its efficacy in driving full-funnel outcomes.
Shopper Feedback
Feedback on creators’ natural posts additionally confirmed the marketing campaign struck a chord with shoppers.
-
- We constructed model love for Instacart:
- Occasion prefer it’s 1999 along with your Instacart snacks! Like it!
- dude that is my dream model deal I really like Instacart a lot
-
- We sparked cravings for ’90s snacks:
- Cross the gushers, dunkaroos and pizzarias.
- very 90s!! additionally imma want these fruity pebbles pls
- Bro i can style the nostalgia 😂😂😂
-
- And we succeeded in tapping into the nostalgic feels, even for these born on this millennium:
- Omg I really like the 90s and 80s however I used to be born in 2013 however I really like the bitter fruit rollups
- Completely agree! (Was alive for 9 months within the 90s)
- I wish to do that for my fifteenth birthday
Discover extra influencer advertising and marketing case research from Linqia right here
Concerning the Creator
Author
